When Dinesh Nepal first arrived in the United States in 2010, he had never heard the term “Asian American.”
He knew he was Asian — he grew up in a refugee camp in Nepal after his parents were expelled from Bhutan, a landlocked Himalayan nation — and, after moving to Pittsburgh and becoming a U.S. citizen, he began to call himself American.
But even after he and his wife opened a store selling bubble tea, a Taiwanese specialty iconic to Asian Americans, it never occurred to him to combine the two brands.
“It wasn't an issue at all,” Nepal, 26, said at his Pittsburgh restaurant, D's Bubble Tea and Cafe.
Since 2008, about 85,000 Nepali-speaking Bhutanese refugees have been resettled in the United States, now living in cities such as Pittsburgh, Columbus, Ohio, and Rochester, New York. Most have acquired American citizenship, making them the newest group of Asians.
Older people who still have vivid memories of their lives in Bhutan primarily identify themselves as Bhutanese-American, although some, like Mr. Nepal, prefer to call themselves Nepali-American because they speak the Nepali language and practice Nepali culture.
The refugees arrived long after Bay Area student activists coined the term “Asian American” in 1968, a broad identity forged over decades of bringing together communities that, like the people of Bhutan today, considered themselves distinct.
The Bhutanese American experience highlights the complexity of Asian American identity — it's a political and cultural identity as well as a geographic and racial label — and not all Americans with Asian roots find meaning in it.
Nearly a dozen Bhutanese Americans interviewed by The New York Times said they thought the term “Asian American” better described East Asian groups like the Chinese, Japanese and Koreans who have different languages, looks and cultures from their own. To them, “Asian” was just a box to check on one of the many forms they had to fill out when they arrived in the United States.
They say Bhutanese people, as a community, face different challenges: Americans often stereotype Asian Americans as the “model minority,” viewing the community as a whole as affluent and well-educated.
But most Bhutanese Americans arrived without the language skills or qualifications and work in entry-level jobs such as warehouse workers, home helpers, and truck drivers. As of 2019, only about 15% of Bhutanese American adults had a bachelor's degree or higher, compared with 54% of Asian American adults.
Although Bhutanese have become more established in the United States in recent years, many face unique mental health challenges associated with the refugee experience, including displacement, poverty and political persecution.
“That was our biggest goal, to have our own home and be able to say we belong to a country, because we were stateless for so many years,” said Kala Timsina, executive director of the Pittsburgh Bhutanese Community Association, a local nonprofit.
The Asian American population is incredibly diverse, with roots in more than 20 countries and speaking numerous languages. Some Asian American families are seventh-generation families whose ancestors immigrated in the 19th century, while others are new immigrants who barely know the discrimination that led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, violence against Sikhs on the West Coast in the early 1900s, or the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
Bhutanese refugees resettled across the U.S., but many chose to return to Pittsburgh, attracted by the city's relatively low cost of living and the abundance of entry-level warehouse jobs. There are now about 7,000 Bhutanese Americans living in and around Pittsburgh, Timsina said.
Yad Gurung, 83, said he was about 50 years old when he was arrested by the Bhutanese government and falsely accused of inciting protests.
Bhutan's king considered tens of thousands of ethnic Nepalese to be “illegal immigrants”, but many families, like Gurung's, had lived in the country for generations and cultivated crops such as rice and cardamom.
In the early 1990s, more than 100,000 Nepali-speaking Bhutanese were expelled and sent to UN refugee camps in Nepal. Gurung spent seven years in a Bhutanese prison as a political prisoner, where he said he was tortured. After his release, he eventually ended up in a refugee camp in Nepal and then in the United States.
Gurung choked back tears in a recent interview as he recalled reuniting with his children in Pittsburgh in 2015 after being separated from them for nearly 25 years.
Gurung would later discover that his children had done remarkably well: His daughter and five sons had secured stable jobs and eventually bought their own homes. Gurung, who became a US citizen last year, now spends his days caring for his grandchildren, studying Buddhist teachings, and picking apples and cherries with other Bhutanese on local farms.
He doesn't think much about identity.
“I am who I am, no matter what you say to me,” he said through a Nepali translator. “What's important is that we have the freedom to practice our culture here.”
Asian Americans, who make up about 7% of the U.S. population, are now considered the fastest-growing racial group in the country, drawing close attention from politicians and pollsters.
So Asian American leaders have held fast to the idea of strength in numbers, and their efforts benefited from a surge in Asian immigration after the landmark immigration law of 1965. As the government began to integrate Asian Americans and Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, the coalition grew even larger, and May is now widely observed as AANHPI month.
Currently, over 70 American universities offer Asian American studies programs, and many states have passed laws mandating Asian American history curricula at the K-12 level.
But maintaining this disparate coalition isn't always easy: A Pew Research Center survey released last year found that more than half of Asian adults in the U.S. prefer more specific terms to describe them, such as “Chinese American” or “Filipino American.”
“It's a constant effort by activists, advocates and leaders to continue the narrative that we have something in common and that it makes sense to work together politically,” said Dina Okamoto, a sociology professor at Indiana University Bloomington and author of a book on Asian American identity.
In Pittsburgh, there are signs that many Bhutanese Americans are beginning to warm to the broader term Bhutan as they spend more time in the country.
Jason Bhandari, 34, an educational assistant for Pittsburgh Public Schools and associate pastor at the Pittsburgh Bhutanese Hosanna Church, said he has come to understand that Nepali-speaking Bhutanese have a lot in common with other Asian American groups, including a love of rice and an emphasis on family values.
Ristica Neopany, 19, said she often described herself as Nepalese American or South Asian when she was a teenager growing up in Pittsburgh. Now a freshman at Slippery Rock University, she says she began to identify as Asian American after meeting students from countries like Myanmar, Korea and Japan.
“I fit in with them and I know they're called Asian American so I feel like I'm a part of it now,” Neopany said.
The Asian Festival Night at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh featured performances by local Asian American cultural groups, including three young dancers from the Bhutanese community.
On the day of the show, both Riya Timsina (no relation to Khara Timsina) and Shriya Rimal were sitting cross-legged on the floor backstage.
Thirteen-year-olds Riya and Shriya said they identify as Asian American but have mixed feelings about the label, often feeling like the American idea of ”Asian” didn't apply to them. For example, the surge in hate attacks against East Asians during the pandemic was widely described as “anti-Asian,” even though South Asians, including Nepali Americans, were not targeted.
Still, Liya and Shriya felt comfortable being around other Asian Americans, and at festivals like these, their Nepali heritage felt welcomed and celebrated. They felt like they had a place in the Asian American community.
The two girls took to the stage and danced to an upbeat traditional Nepalese rural love song before taking a final bow and flashing beaming smiles as the packed audience, which represented a diverse cross-section of the local Asian American community, applauded and cheered in their approval.